How does the pandemic end? Losing control of the COVID-19 pandemic illness narrative.

The end of a pandemic is as much a political act as biological reality. It is over not simply when case counts or deaths are reduced to some objectively determined acceptable level but also when, and if, the public accepts the stories that politicians and health officials tell about it. This paper has three aims. First, to develop the concept of a pandemic illness narrative - a public narrative that makes the experience of an outbreak meaningful to a community of people and explains when it will be finished. Using the case of the United States, the paper then examines how American state organisations and public health officials tried to disseminate a version of the 'restitution illness narrative' to make sense out of the COVID-19 pandemic and explain how it would ultimately end. Lastly, the paper describes the factors that made this narrative ultimately implausible to the American public. As most Americans are now seemingly indifferent about the pandemic, it has ended in the United States without ever actually being narratively concluded.

Self-Care as Social Crafting: Transnational Narratives During COVID-19.

Contrary to public health framings of self-care as individualized bodily regulation, people's transnational COVID-19 narratives revealed self-care to be a means of crafting social relatedness. In their self-care practices, interviewees drew on their richly structured field of relations, exercised dexterity and discernment in attending to them, and forged new webs of relatedness. Moreover, some recounted moments of radical care when they disregarded bodily boundaries in co-isolating with and caring for infected friends or relatives. These narratives of caring with rather than in isolation from one's social entanglements provide an alternative imaginary through which we can consider future pandemic responses.

Chicken Doctors and the Trials of Transcendence: Unveiling Gallinera/o Illness Narratives

This autoethnographic, multidisciplinary illness narrative describes the working conditions of a crew of Latina/o chicken workers (gallineras/os) in North Carolina and explores how these laborers respond to and make meaning of their brutal and dehumanizing work. Transporting us back to a pre-pandemic era, this project seeks to demonstrate how systemic conditions, exacerbating health disparities among poultry workers during COVID-19, are, in fact, endemic and will persist after a post-pandemic US society. Engaging with medical anthropological scholarship that investigates the intersections between Latina/o labor, legislation, and health, this project employs structural violence and structural vulnerability frameworks to investigate the network of structures that contribute to poor health outcomes among Latina/o immigrant workers. “Chicken Doctors” explores how disabling working conditions and their attending legislative and occupational policies debilitate Latina/o immigrant workers, and it argues that gallinera/o labor must be understood as a form of illness, as their toil leaves them with daily pains and lasting impairments. The project draws from an interview with the author’s father, who worked as a gallinera/o laborer and manager for over two decades, as well as from the author’s own observations and journal entries written during his work as a gallinera/o. The piece details the incapacitating gallinera/o labor required to move and vaccinate chickens, describes the toxic working environments, and reflects upon the collective strategies for transcendence that gallineras/os employ to survive their conditions. While this project unveils the spirited resilience of gallineras/os, who make up an essential link in the poultry industry chain but are less conspicuous than their meatpacking counterparts, it especially seeks to expose the network of injustices surrounding their labor.

Photojournalism and Covid-19: representation and invisibility during the first confinement in Spain

The State of Alarm period declared by the Spanish Government due to the coronavirus crisis has had an exhaustive media coverage. However, it is observed how the visual story / narrative that has been published in the newspapers goes beyond the health field, focusing mainly on aspects of a social, political or economic nature. The types of images with the greatest presence in the representation of the harshest weeks of the pandemic determine the type of coverage, causing some relevant aspects to be minimized or invisibilized, and conditions the impact and the understanding of the severity of the disease in the society, in a particularly difficult and decisive moment such as the confinement of citizens. In the same way, the published images will have a later impact as a document by becoming part of the historical memory in the future. This article focuses on the analysis of the images published during the State of Alarm in three of the most relevant and broader scope national newspapers (El país, La vanguardia and El mundo), which is complemented by semi-directed interviews with several photojournalists who have covered Covid-19 during its first stage. The cataloging of the photographs in various categories is intended to observe the type of story that has been made visible of the Covid-19 (assessing the way in which this pandemic is being shown as an epidemic or syndemic), as well as to detect some of the most present and/or recurring visual representations and identify which are the most prominent absences.